CoBots or Collaboration Robots are gaining their place in the industry, and are expected to come to our homes. We start to see assembly cells where robots and humans work together in assembly tasks. There are however always risks that are currently more related to human errors than robot failures. The risks may have different severity levels, from a badly assembled product to hurting a human due to operator misattention. 

Frequently the attention is lost for just a fraction of time and when the human detects the error it is too late for pressing the Safety-Stop Button.

The objective of this work is to develop a virtual scenario where we can study the interaction issues between robots and humans in collaborative environments, e.g. handover of objects. Speed, visibility and other factors will be analised to understand which are adequate factors for correct and efficient collaboration. This work will benefit from an active collaboration that exists between IS3L-ISR and ProActionLab and be complemented by the development of a Brain-Computer Interface designed for Safe Human-Robot Interaction. 

The development is expected to include the development of a Gazebo-based environment containing Kinova Gen3 robot (and possibly a Baxter) controlled by ROS modules. These modules will be designed so that they may reproduce the same scenario and situations with real physical counterparts of these robots, available in our labs.